got twins on the brain again, and while i never want to be one to police other peoples' fanart, especially when the official art starts doing this too by the time we hit tlovm, i do think it's a tragedy that the common depiction of the twins these days is as indistinguishable from being elves
bc the fact that as half elves they are easily clockable as outsiders to either humans or elves is a huge part of their story
as someone with a lot of experience in that myself, i can say with certainty that while you want to be able to call both sides of you your identity, in practice the people of that identity excluding you for being not enough like them just makes you feel like you're lying if you call yourself either
and when it comes to vex and vax, as usual, they both respond to that in opposite ways!
vax wants to be human. he has immense nostalgia for the time they had with their mother, and an even more intense hatred for everything about syngorn. every time someone in the campaign mistakes him for an elf he immediately gets set on edge and has to correct them. even with sprigg, where he's pretending not to listen in to sprigg's ramblings, the second sprigg refers to him as the elf boy, he has to jump in with this
vex, on the other hand, wants to be an elf. the bullying she faced in syngorn for being too human destroyed her self esteem, and she's constantly trying to prove she's good enough to be one of them. it doesn't come naturally to her either, her being herself sticks out in a way she finds deeply embarrassing, and so many of all her layers and masks and pretenses have been built up to originally cover a single fact - she just isn't an elf
and skipping over that also means you lose another facet i love, which is that vax moving to zephrah and vex moving to whitestone wasn't just about being near their respective partners
if you take the comics as canon, keyleth was the first half elf either of them had met aside from each other. and keyleth's existence was a revelation for vax - half elves aren't all a product of an interracial relationship. keyleth's parents are both also half elves. zephrah represents generations of half elves, it's the first community he genuinely feels at home in. yes he loves keyleth but also just being around the people of zephrah is the first time he's ever gotten evidence of people like him not being a mistake. he can have an identity that's his own, instead of trying and failing to meet either criteria of his heritage
percy and vex take a different approach. he can't undo all the bullying she faced as a kid, nor can he solve all the world's bigotry, but he can show her that what makes her different is a good thing. the grey hunt title is earned, not given, which means that nothing and no one can take it away from her, not even him. she's not an elf, but she can be better. she's not human, but whitestone isn't just a home to humans anymore. they're rebuilding the city from the ground up, with her at the heart of it. she's earned her place here not because of what she was born as, but because of who she became. she is the foundation. and that makes whitestone more of a home than any place that made her jump through hoops to belong there
